Geology Reference
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ible events, while time's cycle is the intelligibility of timeless order and
lawlike structure. We must have both.
Caveats
This topic has a limited, and rather self-serving, domain and pur- pose. It is
no conventional work of scholarship, but a quest for personal understanding
of key documents usually misinterpreted (at least by me in my first readings,
before I grasped the role of vision and metaphor in science). I claim
absolutely no originality for the theme of time's arrow and time's cycle—for
this dichotomy has been explored by many students of time, from Mircea
Eliade, Paolo Rossi, J. T. Eraser, and Richard Morris in our generation, back
through Nietzsche to Plato. Many historians of geology (from Reijer
Hooykaas, to C. C. Gillispie, to M. J. S. Rudwick, to G. L. Davies and others)
have also recognized its influence, but have not worked out its full sway
through textual analysis.
In addition, this topic uses an almost reactionary method that, I pray, will not
offend my colleagues in the history of science. It rests, first of all, as Rossi
(1984) exemplifies so well in contrast, on restrictive taxonomies. The
discovery of time is scarcely the work of three thinkers in Great Britain (and
I use them only because I am trying to disperse the traditional myth from
within). Moreover, I have followed the limited and unfashionable method of
explication des textes.
This work is a close analysis of the central logic in the
first editions of three seminal documents in the history of geology. I do not
maintain that such a myopic procedure can substitute for true history,
especially since the greatest contemporary advances in our understanding of
science have emerged from the opposite strategy of expansive analysis and
exploration of social contexts. My admiration for this work is profound. I
could not have begun to conceive this topic without insights provided by
broadened horizons that this expansive work has provided for all of us. I do
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